Wrote a bit today, and played around with my ever-evolving LaTeX template, this time misappropriated for my software major work.

I’m very tempted, now, to write my own LaTeX class which sucks in all the necessary black magic – it should be a fun and educational challenge to modify the book document class, and would probably necessitate working out how to set up font overrides for setting runs not made with the XeTeX or LuaTeX engines (the only ones to support all the OpenType evil I’m doing).

Amongst other things, started playing with xindy, the replacement for makeindex, which is, as ever, showing signs of its age. There’s no really good tutorial on how to use it, surprisingly, but as far as I can tell, it’s possible to simply drop the texindy command in for makeindex in a setting run.

Also discovered that the clock in inara is drifting insanely. I twigged to this when I saw

> l majorproject*
-rw-------  1 jashank  jeremy  11243  9 Nov 20:37 majorproject.lyx
-rw-------  1 jashank  jeremy   6948  9 Nov  2012 majorproject.tex

ls(1) usually reports dates in the format shown on the first line (the strftime(3) format ‘%d %b %H:%M’) – but

If the modification time of the file is more than 6 months in the
past or future, then the year of the last modification is
displayed in place of the hour and minute fields.

… so, what, this file was modified over six months in the future? Well… not quite.

> date && l -T majorproject*
Fri  9 Nov 2012 20:47:49 EST
-rw-------  1 jashank  jeremy  11243  9 Nov 20:37:00 2012 majorproject.lyx
-rw-------  1 jashank  jeremy   6948  9 Nov 20:48:34 2012 majorproject.tex

Hm.

So, I reckon Marty and Doc have hopped over, put a flux capacitor in inara, and gone on their merry way. If only I knew how they’d managed to do it…